How do you backup Notes?

Since this thread is in the Mac OS X Mountain Lion forum it will only pertain to a Mac operating system. The thread was discussing Mac OS X's Notes application which synced with Notes on iOS. Once the notes were synced to OS X on the computer we were able to back up that copy. Most in this section probably do not know much about Windows. It would be my guess you would want to get iOS Notes syncing with Google Mail or through Outlook on your PC where you could back them up.

There is always the iOS backup but I am not comfortable calling this a true backup.

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This is helpful, but where are the actual notes? I want to put them on a hard drive for safe keeping.

Since macosx el capitan, upgraded notes keeps its databases in Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes. Previous folder Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes is used for previous format of notes, so - it contains your old formatted notes before converting it to next version of Notes.

so Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes and Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes should be copied for backing up, new one and old.

Thanks so much for the new file locations. And have setup a secondary backup.

In the past, I was able to use an sqlite3 command to convert my Notes into HTML.

But the command I used:

sqlite3 'SELECT * FROM ZNOTEBODY;'

no longer works.

Anybody figure out how to dump the contents of the new SQL?

That didn't convert anything. It just displayed each of the fields in the znotebody table.

As far as I can determine, the table schema now doesn't have a textual representation of the Notes as they aren't necessarily text anymore. The content is stored as streams of data (BLOB).

For each note, you'd have to know the type of data that is stored and pass that to a program that can read them.

Hmmm... not having a way to backup / export the Notes is a big problem for me.

I'm able to manually export them but that's not really a long-term solution for me.

I keep important billing information in there. Might have to switch over to using a text doc in Dropbox.

Wonderfully obvious answer that I'd totally overlooked - thanks Ashka!

I need to BACKUP IPHONE NOTES: So how does a person who has no idea what you are talking about (how to do all the computer steps) on how to backup and find the notes backup?

Is there an EASY way to backup and find them? HOW??

Is anyone at Apple working on this. I keep VERY IMPORTANT INFO on my notes.

konagal wrote:

I need to BACKUP IPHONE NOTES: So how does a person who has no idea what you are talking about (how to do all the computer steps) on how to backup and find the notes backup?

If you can determine where the Notes database lives, backup/restore that. I'm not longer using Mountain Lion, so I have no idea where the files exist in that OS.

It is pretty much a whole thing, at this point. Based on what people have posted, there is now no way find a single file per note, as far as can tell. It's been several years since I used that OS.

I am actually using El Capitan now and was asking about that hoping someone could answer for that. Noticed it is harder to backup Notes with this version on the computer. I wanted to backup Notes on my iPhone because I had to erase everything. Noticed that after checking iCloud backup it DID NOT BACKUP NOTES after upgrading to El Capitan. Only backed up to the date I upgraded. So, my question relates to El Capitan and iPhone 6 plus

Every once in a while, I manually back-up all of my notes, one at a time, to a folder that Time Machine knows about. That's enough of a pain that if I fumble-finger a note to be bad, I'm lucky if I can get close to the current note.

How can an operating system that recognizes that we need, need, need Time Machine not work Notes the same way as it does other critical data?

I was surprised when I used Spotlight Search to find a deleted note, which restored itself when I selected it.